Legal humor. Seriously.

March 15, 2007

Malaysian Police Round Up Midget Gang

Police in Malaysia have finally captured the "Midget Gang," a group of eight tiny bandits who had committed a string of burglaries over at least the past three months in the central Ampang district. According to the original report in the Star newspaper, the gang members have confessed to the crimes, and said that the advantage of being very small criminals is that they can more easily squeeze through small openings in order to get into a building and burgle it.

The Star reported that all the gang members are "diminutive," though it did not make clear whether all of them actually have a dwarfing condition such as, for example, achondroplasia, spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita, diastrophic dysplasia, pseudoachondroplasia, hypochondroplasia, or osteogenesis imperfecta, or whether they are all just short. (Please note that the term "Midget Gang" appears in the original report; as I have frequently noted, the term "midget," which once referred to a dwarf whose limbs were all proportionate, is now generally considered offensive. According to the Little People of America, "dwarf" is the preferred generic term, although as they note you should just learn the little person's name and use that.)

I also want to call your attention to the fact that the LPA's blog, Dwarfblog, refers to a recent Spanish theater festival that featured a cast of little people in a production of Ibsen's The Dollhouse.

Where was I?

Oh. The octet of diminutive Malaysians is accused of at least 14 burglaries over the last three months. They were arrested after residents in a local housing area noticed a group of small people "loitering suspiciously" in a field nearby, and (apparently being aware of the Midget Gang's crime spree) notified police.